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Laws of association

Association is a functional relationship or connection between two psychological phenomenna established through learning or experience. It is a bond or connection between ideas. Bond is further an agreement or engagement that a person is bound to observe, especially, one that has force in law. Laws of association based on the principle formulated by the associationists to account for the functional relationships between ideas put forward the laws of contiguity, similarity, and contrast postulated by Aristotle. The law of contiguity, which states that of two experiences which occur close together in time, the subsequent occurrence of one will tend to elicit the other, proved to be the most fundamental of the laws and still plays a role in theories of verbal learning, animal learning, and conditioning. In addition, laws of association may be of utmost importance if two experiences are elaborated in regard to the events that occur naturally in an individual’s spheres of life. Naturalism, in philosophy, is the system of thought that holds that natural causes and laws explain all phenomena, and, in psychology, is the point of view that mental processes, attitudes, and other psychological processes are part of the system of natural phenomena and, therefore, interpretable according to natural laws. Psychology may be classified as a natural science instead of as a social science. Instead of two experiences, these are two events as per the law of contiguity, and it is an association between two events and not the entities. Therefore, laws of association plays a role in cognitive aspects, real-life situations, or in solving the problematic conditions in the life of an individual.